Local // Native Son

There’s a San Francisco city — and a San Francisco county. Here’s where to see the county

There’s an old saying about the city and county of San Francisco. The part where everything happens — North Beach, Chinatown, Nob Hill, the Mission, the Castro, South of Market, that’s the city. The rest — all those places on the other side of Twin Peaks and out by the beach, that’s the county.

The gold rush, the earthquake, the Summer of Love, the tech boom all happened in another part of town. “We do have a history out here, but it’s a quieter history,” said Lorri Ungaretti, who grew up in the Sunset District and wrote three books about what she likes to call “the city’s largest neighborhood.”

The Sunset runs from the south side of Golden Gate Park to Sloat Blvd., from about Sixth Avenue west to Ocean Beach, just under 7 square miles. More than 85,000 San Franciscans live there.

The other big western neighborhood is the Richmond, on the north side of the park. The Richmond is different: It has hills, more businesses, more variety. A faster pace.

The Sunset is quieter, more bland. There are no noted buildings, no Victorians. Everything looks pretty much the same, apartments and small houses. The streets are as regular as a checkerboard. It is famously foggy. “The joke that went around is that they call it the Sunset because we never see one,” Ungaretti said.

But when the weather shifts in the fall of the year, the row houses look like building blocks of different colors, red, yellow, brown, basking in the sun. And at the end of the streets is the blue Pacific Ocean. This is the end of the continent. Next stop: Hawaii.

In its quiet way, the Sunset is San Francisco in microcosm. Its beginnings were unpromising. When San Francisco sprang up like a boom town at the edge of the famous harbor, what became the Sunset was a sandy desert, a cold Sahara.

The big change came in the late 1920s and ’30s, when developers built thousands of houses on the sand dunes in a few years and gave the neighborhood the look it has today. The best known of the developers was Henry Doelger, who built 2,800 homes in the Sunset, At one point, in 1940 or so, he was building two houses a day and sold them to “Mr. and Mrs. Average San Franciscan” at $5,000 each.

A Sunset house for $5,000, the equivalent of $87,000 in today’s money, was affordable housing even at the end of the Great Depression. Now the median price of a Sunset house is $1.398 million, according to real estate websites.

The tract houses we see today in the Sunset are part of the tides of change that have swept over the city. The first new residents came from other parts of the city: San Franciscans, most of them children of Italian and Irish immigrants, moved up — up from the Mission or North Beach, to the avenues, as old-time San Franciscans call the neighborhood. The Sunset and Richmond were the Pacific Heights of the middle class.

As late as 1964, three years before the Summer of Love, the Sunset was 85.8% white, according to a Chronicle report. But then came the big change. Thousands and thousands of San Francisco families moved away. Maybe the fog did them in, or bad schools, or crime, or life in the city. They had moved up. They moved out.

When the older San Franciscans left, the newer San Franciscans moved in.

Now the Sunset is close to 50% Asian. Just under a third of Sunset residents identify themselves as white. Eighteen percent are Hispanic, 5% black.

The Sunset, like much of San Francisco, is a mosaic: There are mini Sunset neighborhoods that are mostly Asian, and others that are mostly white, like the Inner Sunset around Ninth Avenue and the far Outer Sunset near the ocean.

There’s an Irish cultural center on one corner of the Sunset, and the Gold Mirror, an old school Italian restaurant, on another. In between are dozens of Asian restaurants, especially along Noriega Street.

It is a uniquely San Francisco place: The Thrillist website says that San Tung on Irving Street in the Inner Sunset has the world’s best chicken wings. Others swear that the Devil’s Tooth bakery on Noriega in the Outer Sunset has the city’s best breakfast sandwiches. Both may be true.

After a long couple of days driving and walking around the Sunset, I caught the 7-Haight/Noriega bus at 46th and Noriega for the long ride home. Once across Stanyan Street and then down Haight street, I could see a big difference. I was back in the city. There was a kind of electric intensity, more noise, more people, more more. I missed the county.

Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf